As part of my internship with RockPointe Students, I got to work on the design and social media for our student winter retreat from the ministry side, as opposed to the designer side I see in my creative team role. This years theme is the Crown of Glory based off of 1 Peter 5:1-11.

The Design Process

The design uses a crown on a dark background with gold veins. We chose serif fonts to make it feel weighty and historical. Our lead designer created an incredible graphics package based on our input. I got to see some of the challenges with communication between designers and the ministry. Designers have been taught to visualize these elements and honed the ability to translate these ideas into editable designs. Non-designers are less experiences with this kind of visualization and may outsource this to tools like AI image generation which creates flattened files that can be edited of highly-variable levels of quality.

Social Media

We decided to use social media to build hype for the event after registration had closes and to introduce the characters for the skits and games. The videos were designed to be posted on Instagram as vertical reels but we had played the vertical videos on the horizontal screens on Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings. So instead of filming a vertical video, I decided to try shooting high quality horizontal open gate video using Blackmagic Camera on a recent iPhone Pro. While shooting, I used the 9:16 overlay to keep the subjects in frame while recording to reduce the need for tracking in post.

Since we recorded directly on to an external ssd, I was able to simply drag the video files directly into Final Cut Pro and start editing. Instead of following my typical flow of reviewing footage and building clips in the media browser, I created project around the clips. I was able to work this way because we shot efficiently with only a couple of takes per reel which were under two minutes long. My typical flow works better for long-form content and recap videos rather than short-form. I started by creating a vertical video project from each clip. I scaled up the 4k footage to fill the project then did some basic audio work (loudness, noise removal, and a slight EQ). I also did some minor color grading to ensure color looked consistent between the clips. I then added a crossfade to the corresponding graphic for each video (story graphic for reels, slide for video). Since the footage was recorded as open gate, I was able to simply duplicate the reel projects with the cuts and audio tweaks, change the project resolution to horizontal video, then set the right scale for an easy video.